Jul 20, 2010

Strategic Addressing for Effective Local Search

One of the sure-fire ways to optimize your website for local search results is to make strategic use of your business address. A good place to start your local search optimization is right at your web pages. Here are some ways to do this:

1. List your address at the "About Us" page. Commonly, this page is all about your business and includes your history, services or products. But you can seize this opportunity to mention the location of your business as part of what you are about.

2. Place your address at the "Contact Us" page. This is often the right place for your address, lumped together with your telephone numbers and email addresses.

3. Place your address at the footer or blog side bar. This method makes sure that your address is visible at every page that users visit or every time search bots index your pages.

4. Incorporate a Google Map widget. Type in your address at Google Maps, make the necessary adjustments to get your location decently visible on the map, and click on the link button to get the HTML code that you can embed in your website.

5. Avoid keyword stuffing. Don't place the address as actual content to your blog posts or pages. Search engines may penalize you with keyword stuffing when they see the word combination being repeated several times.

6. Use microformatting code. Microformatting your address means placing code snippets to let search engines know that this group of words is an address. The snippet often appears similar to below:

7. Use consistent and clear addressing. Once you begin with "Avenue", use it everywhere. If you prefer abbreviations, use it consistently as well. For ambiguous abbreviations like “CA” that can stand for either California or Canada, always resolve the ambiguity.

Including your address at every page of your website, without violating search engine rules will help bring your address into prominence -- both in the eyes of users and search engine spiders. This increases the effectiveness of local search for your business.